Rules of the Game • Daniel Ricciardo

It shouldn't have been as funny as it was to you that in the beginning you'd somehow managed to convince yourself that a set of rules created and agreed upon by the pair of you would be able to keep the friendship and the sex, you and Daniel, his lack of feelings and your excess of them, all neatly in their designated places.

The rules may have been your idea, but the rest of it, from that first night in his kitchen to the game he'd made out of getting overly familiar where the boundaries outlined in the rulebook fell, that had been all Daniel. He'd been the one who had made the first move but you had been all too happy to let him because he was right, it just made sense for the two of you to not take complete advantage of the opportunity that had landed in your laps.

You'd been so certain that if you went about this the right way, he never had to know about the barest flicker of a crush and you'd be able to extinguish it before it could ever become a problem. Yet, the thing is, trying to suffocate an ember by burying it under layers of kindling isn't at all how forest fires are prevented- it's how acre after acre fall victim to the flames.